Love Letter to No One

 

Kim Shable

 

 

If I could draw, I would only draw your face. Over and over, your face, looking at me as if I mattered, at all, head slightly dog tilted, as if you cared, at all, I matter, you care, at all.

But I can’t draw.

 

I’m not the type to go in for this sort of thing.

The love thing, really. What is it? Two people, pheromones interact, ta da, and then love springs forth, forever and ever, amen. Or, that’s how they tell me it happens. Eyes lock across a crowded room, that sort of thing. Hands brush. You have a beautiful smile. Magic.

But I’ve never done that whole two-person love thing. There is a lack of interest on the part of every other person on the planet. My eyes are ready to lock, my hands itchy to brush. But everyone else is curiously otherwise engaged.

I do the tortured love thing. I do the I want what I can never have thing. The sit home alone and wait for the phone to ring, because I know you want me, I know it thing.

 

What I imagine is you coming to me finally, finally. I’ve been wrong, you say. Wrong this whole time. Out there in the world, looking for someone who was like me, but not me, when you could have just had me.

What you will say: “How could I have been so stupid?”

What I will say: “It happens.”

Then you’ll climb into bed with me—in these fantasies I’m always in bed, and you bust in, somehow, break the door down, jimmy the lock, anything to get to me—and cover yourself with the blanket, and I’ll put my head on your chest, and your arm around me, and you’ll fall asleep like that, and I’ll stay awake, counting your breaths until morning.

 

There is no you.

If there were a you, this would all be different. There would be a face on it, a real face on a real body, with real hands that would want to brush mine. But there’s not even that, just a vague notion of you, like a mathematical theorem, an imaginary number that repeats into infinity, but never quite takes shape.

You can’t mow my lawn when I’m too tired, or order for me at restaurants, or call me on your way home from work.

I’ve considered naming an interim you, until I find one, another you that won’t want to be with me, until he realizes how tragically right we are for each other. Maybe Dick Clark could be you. Just to put a face on all that empty space in my bed at night.

 

Things I would do for you, if you let me:

Pick up your dry cleaning, do your shopping, make your phone calls. Wash your clothes, laugh at your jokes, eat your leftover cake, watch my figure, pick up after myself. Quit my job, talk dirty to you in crowded elevators. Make cookies and give them all to you. Watch televised basketball and documentaries on Nazis. Cut my hair, grow my hair, straighten my hair, shave it. Anything.

 

            I want to be a motherfucking rock star.

            If I were a motherfucking rock star, everyone would love me. I would wear beads and fringed shirts and drown in thick-rimmed glasses of Southern Comfort. Start small at first, sing in empty piano bars, then crowded ones, then empty bars, up the timeline to headlining packed stadiums, which I would hate, because I would be a motherfucking rock star, and stadiums would cramp my style. Then thinner girls than me would sing my songs in karaoke smoke bubbles while people dance, but they would have the style, the soul that I do, because they haven’t eaten glass.

And if I were a motherfucking rock star, you would come to my show because you had to, because you didn’t believe in me, had to see. When it’s over, you think, you’ll put your arm around me, “there, there” me, and know that you were right all along, that I didn’t have it in me.

And when I sang, and the crowd closed in around you, crushing the drugstore carnations you brought to provide me your thick brotherly solace, you might as well have been alone, because who is this, now? Because this can’t be the same girl, because you thought you knew it all, that you had been right all along. And if you didn’t know I was a motherfucking rock star, what else have I kept hidden?

Leave the flowers at the stage door. They’ll be one bouquet among many.

 

I want to come over and watch you read a book, your legs swung over the edge of the couch, bare tan feet stretching for the floor. I want to watch you run your fingers over the bare inch of skin between your shirt and your boxer shorts. I want to tell you how handsome you are, how beautiful, how much you don’t know, how you swing your arms loosely when you walk, how I deserve you, that I wish I were as interesting to you as the book you cradle against your chest.

 

Why I need you:

To send back food I won’t eat. To rub my back through my shirt at a party I find boring. To hold my seat at the movies. To hold my hand at the movies. To tell me I’m beautiful. To notice my shoes. To know my face in the dark. To pour my beer. To laugh at my jokes and mean it, to let me get snot on your T-shirt when I cry. To make me think love songs on the radio are about me. To call me during thunderstorms to make sure I’m okay. To tell me stories about when you were young. To wear clothes I buy you for Christmas. To give me an excuse to watch football on TV. To eat the parts of my meal that I’m afraid of. To make me feel like I matter. To make me real.

 

When I find you, ours will not be a love categorized as magical. Nor will it be visceral, or powerful, tortured, or for the ages. Ours will be a love that revolves around burping and contemplating ordering gadgetry from infomercials. We will sit on the couch together, my legs in your lap, your hand on my knee, and watch reruns of Love Boat, or read aloud to each other the News and Notes section of Entertainment Weekly. We won’t hold hands in public, even though I’ll want to, secretly, because we’ll be too cool for that. We’ll be too cool for everyone. Ours will be a cool love.

 

I am fascinated by your body, the length of your arms and legs, the hollow of your armpit. The hairiness of you, the distinct maleness. The way you smell, like cold air and clean sheets.

 

My fantasy: you do something horrible—or it’s just enough’s enough—and I blow this popsicle stand, leaving you behind. Check into a hotel with no sign on the street. No one knows where I am—you call around, and I’m not with anyone, I’m not anywhere. It gets hard, suddenly—I was there, the whole time, and then I’m gone, and it gets HARD. It gets LONELY.

Word gets back to you that I’ve been seen here or here—spotted like a Sasquatch or a winter storm on radar. So you drive out there, try to find me, but you’ve always just missed me. You come to where I work with flowers—you memorized my schedule without even knowing it, didn’t you?—with these “I’m so sorry” flowers, and I put them in the trash can, or give them to one of the other girls, right in front of you. Because that’s how much I care.

And when we make up, you will cry, tell me how IMPORTANT I am to you, how much you MISSED me, and I will smile, but it won’t be the same as before, because now the tables have turned. Ephemeral you, you and I now have an understanding.